Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it lands with someone like you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.
Hi founders,
When the conflict started 2 weeks ago, I found myself living entirely online endlessly for hours. Since I am in the UAE, staying on top of the news for the first 48 hours felt like a survival instinct. But at what point does this become unhelpful?
When I finally decided to drop my phone and stepped outside on day three, I was struck by how comforting it was to see people walking their dogs. buying coffee, living their lives as normal.
That moment of disorientation, the gap between the catastrophe in my head and the ordinary reality around me, broke the spell.
Our internal state does not have to be entirely governed by the external world. It can remain calm and collected, even when the world outside feels chaotic.
I realized I hadn't been seeking information. I'd been seeking certainty in a situation that was going nowhere: Reading one more thread, one more analysis... Some part of me believes that if I just stay mentally engaged long enough, the discomfort will finally resolve.
But it wouldn’t.
Doomscrolling and rumination are the same mindless spiral. When any uncertainty becomes too hard to tolerate, whether in work or in the world, it becomes easy to turn to compulsive content consumption and repetitive overthinking - even when most news sources are entirely unreliable.
To tell ourselves to just ‘put the phone down’ is like treating the symptoms without understanding the cause.
So, what is the root of the problem?
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The uncertainty we can't tolerate
The common thread isn't our phones or our anxious behaviours. It's something psychologists call intolerance of uncertainty - the degree to which we find ambiguous situations threatening and unbearable (Bottesi et al., 2022).
When uncertainty spikes, our brain demands a response to feel calm in the perceived danger. That response takes two forms:
outward information-seeking (doomscrolling)
inward mental churning (rumination)
Both are attempts to resolve the ambiguity, to find the answer that will finally let you relax. Research shows that IU directly predicts both compulsive news checking and repetitive negative thinking through the same pathway: overestimating threat and deploying "safety behaviors" to manage it.
But the irony is, these behaviors only amplify the uncertainty.
Why scrolling makes it worse
You might think doomscrolling is just a bad habit. But studies reveal it functions as maladaptive coping - a short-term emotional regulation strategy that worsens long-term distress.
In one study of over 350 workers, researchers tracked doomscrolling and mental health across multiple days. They found that doomscrolling not only correlated with rumination but also amplified and caused anxiety. The more people doomscrolled, the more they ruminated later, which lowered their work engagement and well-being (Hughes et al., 2024).
The behavior creates a feedback loop and reinforces itself: we scroll to escape uncertainty, the content triggers more worry, so we scroll more to manage that worry.
The compulsion beneath the behavior: Intolerance of uncertainty
If you've ever tried to "just stop" doomscrolling or ruminating, you know it doesn't work that way. These behaviors feel automatic, almost involuntary. That's because they share features with addiction: urges, salience, and continued use despite harm.
But the contributing factor to the compulsion is more than how social media is designed - it’s about how our brain processes the absence of information, and the very human need to control the uncontrollable. When we can't predict what will happen, our threat-detection system stays heightened, and it craves resolution.
This cognitive process manifests in rigid certainty demands: the belief that we must know the outcome, that uncertainty itself is dangerous, and that tolerating ambiguity is intolerable.
These beliefs drive two core responses: threat appraisal and safety behaviors.
Threat appraisal: We interpret uncertain situations as more dangerous than they are. Our brain overestimates the likelihood of threats and keeps us in a state of vigilance. This sustained cognitive activation is what researchers call perseverative cognition - our minds stay locked on the threat, replaying scenarios, searching for answers.
Safety behaviors: Actions we take to reduce the perceived threat. Checking the phone and scrolling for updates. Mentally replaying the conversation to find what was missed. These behaviors provide short-term relief and a brief sense of control, but they prevent us from learning that uncertainty is tolerable. Each time we check, we reinforce the belief that uncertainty is dangerous and that we need external information to feel safe.
Why "just put your phone down" misses the point
Most advice treats doomscrolling as a screen-time problem: Limit notifications, use app blockers, take a digital detox. These interventions target the symptom, not the cause.
The research is clear: intolerance of uncertainty drives these behaviors through mediating pathways - maladaptive coping styles, fear of missing out, perceived stress, and rumination. If we don't address those mediators, restricting device access won't change the underlying pattern. We’ll just find another way to seek certainty.
The critical therapeutic target is building uncertainty tolerance - the capacity to sit with ambiguity without needing to resolve it immediately.
Why targeting intolerance of uncertainty changes outcomes while device restrictions don't
Clinical trials of cognitive-behavioral therapy for intolerance of uncertainty (CBT-IU) show that reductions in IU are associated with 59% decreases in worry and anxiety (Bomyea et al., 2015).
When you change the cognitive style, the way you appraise and respond to uncertainty, and the compulsive behaviors lose their function.
Device restrictions, by contrast, don't alter threat appraisal or certainty demands. They create external barriers, but the internal drive and anxiety remain the same.
What actually helps
The next time you catch yourself doomscrolling or spiraling into rumination, think about: What uncertainty am I trying to resolve? Perhaps, there isn't a resolution available, and the situation is entirely out of your control.
That's the moment to practice sitting with "I don't know." Not as defeat, dissociation, but as reality. Uncertainty isn't a problem to solve, but a temporary situation to tolerate. The more we can accept that not everything can be known or controlled right now, the less power these compulsive spirals have over us.
We assume that one more scroll will finally give us the answer. But we’ve already tested that hypothesis hundreds of times.
It doesn't work.
What works is stepping outside and noticing that life continues, that most uncertainties resolve themselves or become irrelevant with time, and that our well-being doesn't depend on having all the answers right now.
Next week’s issue is about the ‘how’: the concrete psychological techniques that reduce compulsive checking and overthinking at the root.
We cannot control uncertainty, but we can strengthen the mind that faces it.
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